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Linking wor(l)ds
Chapter 1:
The vocabulary, or lexis, is composed of more words. A word is unit of meaning that could stand alone and it is built up of morphemes, known as the smallest units of meaning. Also, morphemes can be distinguished in two types: FREE , which is a word on its own with no additional elements, and BOUND , accompanied with more morphemes. Bound are mostly affixes that divide themselves into prefixes, which go before a free morpheme, and suffixes, which are instead put at the end of a free morpheme. At their turn there are two types of affixes: inflectional affixes (usually suffixes) which are used to signal a grammatical relationship (person, tense, number, case) and derivational affixes suffixes or prefixes) used to give a different meaning to a word or to indicate a different word class. English words are derived from older words. Three process of word creation exist:
- Inflection: with the use of inflectional suffixes that leads to the creation of inflected words.
- Derivation: use of derivational prefixes or suffixes that leads to the creation of derived words.
- Compounding: words formed from the combination of 1 or more free morphemes that leads to the creation of compound words. Sometimes, it happens that there is not an equivalence of a word in the mother tongue and the target language, so it is important to paraphrase.
Chapter 2:
Words are linked together I don’t can I buy principle of Lexical relations and sense relations (words linked in term of their meaning). Lexical relations are the co-occurrence of words semantically unrelated. Collocation is the tendency of some words to occur together usually those words are called collocates. Collocational Range User is a set of collocates that accompany a given word, said node. It changes depending on the meaning and the language variety. On the contrary, of monosemic words, Polysemic words have more than one meaning. Synonymy is the relationship that links words (the synonyms) that have the same or almost the same meaning. Synonyms are not always substitutable with each other because they are composed of more components, not necessarily all of them:
- Prepositional meaning is what a word refers to in a concrete or abstract word.
- Expressive meaning : shows the speaker’s feeling or attitude (use of interjections).
- Evoked meaning depends on: Dialect , which is the variety of language used in a geographical zone in a specific time and between a specific groups of people. Register , that is the language used by a speaker in a determined context given by the field of discourse (general context), by the mode (role of language and medium of transmission) and by the tenor (interpersonal relationship). Antonymy is the relationship between antonyms, which are words opposed in meaning in a given context. Antonyms are divided into:
- Gradable antonyms: opposites that can be graded. (e.g. Large= largest, larger, very large, quite large)
- Ungradable antonyms: not gradable. (e.g. Dead/alive, single/married)
- Converse antonyms: opposites that depend on one another. (e.g. brother/sister, give/receive, buy/sell) Hiponymy is the relationship between a specific word, the Hyponym, and a more general one, the Hypernym. The relationship pf hyponymy creates a semantic field in which words at the same level of taxonomy are called co-hyponyms. The words of a semantic field create a lexical set.
Some collocations are culture-specific, so they are hard to translate. To resolve this problem is advisable to use ad hoc collocates, periphrasis, change the meaning or use loan words.
Chapter 3:
Homonymy and polysemy are sense relations and wordplays relies on them to produce remarks and metaphors. A metaphor is a figurative expression that is used to talk about something in terms of another, opposite to the simile that is a figurative expression that does an explicit comparison. In addition a metaphor allows to create a relation between the topic and vehicle to express it. Wordplays/puns are witticism because it plays with different levels of linguistic analysis. It is a challenge to translate both metaphors and puns. Metaphors are difficult to distinguish and recognize, also it is difficult to find an equivalent, so usually it is modificated or completely deleted. While puns can be translated with a similar pun, with a non-pun phrase with the same meaning, with a rhetorical device, it could be omitted, or also it could be introduced to translate a phrase where it is not or it could not be translated at all.
Chapter 4:
The language has also some fixed expressions composed by more than one word. Those fixed expressions are multi-word units, semantically equivalent to single lexical units and they can be lexical phrases or idioms. Lexical phrases are vary in length and complexity; they are used to express time, contrast or relationship between ideas. We can distinguish four groups of lexical phrases.
- polywords: short non-variably phrases, used to evaluate, summarise, shifting or relating topics (e.g. by the way, all in all, in essence)
- Istitutionalized expression: proverbs and formulas for social interaction. (E.g. How do you do?, There you go, Give me a break.)
- Phrasal constraints: short/medium phrases, variably and continuous. (e.g. Dear…, as far as I…, a…ago)
- Sentence builder: framework for the whole sentence (e.g. Not only…but also, I think…, that reminds me of…) Idioms are idiomatic expressions, inferred meaning which part cannot be omitted, changed of order or structure and they can have an idiomatic meaning and a literal one. They can be divided into:
- Idioms easily understandable : which refer to unreal events, not follow grammatical rules or have a simile-like structure.
- Idioms not easily understandable : with literal idiomatic meaning or that have an apparent direct equivalent in the target language. Idioms and lexical phrases does not always have an equivalent in the target language being cultural specific, so they could be translated by paraphrase, omission or compensation or we can find similar meaning and form idioms.
Chapter 5:
Word classes classify words according to their semantic, morphological and syntactic features. Nouns represent concrete or abstract object, people and animals, they express the grammatical category of number (singular and plural, with the suffix – s or – es) and they can occur in the possessive case with‘s. We can create a noun from an adjective adding the suffix – ness or – ity, while we can create a noun from a verb adding the suffix – er, - ee, - ation or – ment. THE+ NOUN = PHRASE; THE+NOUN+VERB=SENTENCE;
Chapter 6:
Word classes can be divided in two groups: a major or open one (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) a minor one. A word can be part of more word classes. The minor class is composed of prepositions, conjunctions and determiners. Prepositions express more than a relationship between a word and another (e.g. above, in, at, on, over, after, before) and they are followed by the object of the preposition. We can also find multi-word preposition as “in front of” or “out of”. A dangling preposition is a preposition put at the end of the sentence. Prepositions usually express cause, possession and by means of something and they are not always the same between English and Italian. Conjunctions are used to join words, phrases and clauses. They can be coordinators, when they link units with the same grammatical status, or subordinators, also called Linking words, that link a clause to the main part of the sentence. Those last one usually indicate time, condition, place, concession, purpose and reason. Determiners come before a noun to form phrases and they express quantity, possession and definiteness. Determiners could be preceeded by pre-determiners. (E.g. the, a, an, that, which, either, enough, more, most, any, much ecc..) A determiner problematic for translation is the definite article in fact it could be omitted. It usually goes before the noun but also to talk in general; it is not used with continents, countries, lakes, mountains and churches.
Chapter 7:
Words are units interacting with other units on different hierarchical levels (word, phrase, clause, sentence, discourse) A phrase is a string of words that forma a syntactic unit and it is called after the head of it (central word). A noun phrase as a noun has head and it is composed of three parts:
- Head noun that decides on verb agreement.
- Pre-modification which is all that comes before the head (determiners and adjectives)
- Post-modification that is what comes after the head (prepositional phrases, finite or non-finite clauses). A noun phrase is hard to define because it has a complex and varied structure. To define it, we can try to substitute the head with a pronoun. A pronoun phrase has a pronoun as head and it is a sub-class of noun phrase. It is a limited structure and one pronoun. In the translation of the noun phrase, it is difficult to put order to pre-modifiers so it is important to follow this scheme: opinion, size, other qualities, age, shape, temperature, colour, pattern, origin, material, purpose, head noun.
Chapter 8:
The verb phrase has a lexical verb as head (a single one or a string of verbs). The verb has four categories that define the meaning of the phrase: tense, aspect, mood and voice. The tense corresponds to the time of a verb, so it specifies when an action or a state takes place. Contrary to the future tense, the present and the past change the form of the verb. The present is used to say general truths, habits, tv events, future events and past events as happening in the present. The past is used for past actions, present state when we want to be polite and for reported speech. The future is used for predictions, scheduled events, immediate events of a fixed plan, future in the past, sure future events, future events determined by the present.
There are two aspect of the verb: perfective aspect of present, past and future (present/past/future perfect simple); progressive aspect (continuous form) that express actions in progress for a period or not finished, such as verbs be + ing. We cannot find in these form verbs of thinking, feeling and perception. There are four moods , which indicate the speaker’s attitude: indicative (has tenses, common mood, indicates facts), imperative (used to give orders, instruction, uses the base form and has no tenses), subjunctive (used to express ideas, beliefs, hope in the past or present tense; it can be found in subordinate clauses) and conditional (used to be polite or in reported speeches and hypothetical statement , present in the first clause of unreal statement). The voice represents the relationship between the verb and the subject. It can be active when the subjects acts, makes an action, or passive when the subject is affected by the action. Between English and Italian, we can find some differences in the verb categories. In Italian, in fact, there are two past simple and two past perfect tenses and there is not a progressive aspect for the perfective tense. However, the Italian progressive is used to underlain the development of an action. Generally we can translate the passato prossimo with the past simple or with the present perfect, while the present perfect is translated with the presente, the past perfect with the imperfect and the future perfect with future anteriore. For this reason it is important to analyse how the verb is presented.
Chapter 9:
The adjective phrase has an adjective as head that could have a predicative, postpositive or attributive position. It could be pre-modified by an adverb, preposition, to-infinitive clause, that-clause, or by an ing- clause and it could be post-modified by a preposition+ noun phrase or verb phrase in the - ing form or by a to-infinitive clause. An adverbial phrase has an adverb as head and it has a simple structure. It could be pre-modified by intensifying adverbs or by the adverb ‘enough’. There are adverbial phrase of manner, place, time and duration that usually at the end of a clause (rarely at the beginning) have more adverbs so we have to follow the order: manner, place, and time/duration. While the adverb phrases of frequency and probability go before a lexical verb but after a primary verb (be) and auxiliary or in a negative phrase, before the negative. A prepositional phrase has a preposition+ a noun phrase (the object of preposition) as head. It is used to inform on place, duration, distance, time, direction, manner, cause, purpose and concession. It functions as post-modifiers for noun phrases and adjectives phrases and many lexical verbs that follow the prepositional phrases are called prepositional verbs. Transpositions is a translational solution for lexical or morph-syntactic mismatches, and it is usually used in formal texts. For translational problems= see pages 120-121.
